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Writing the revolution

Michele Landsberg wrote more than 3,000 trailblazing columns in this newspaper that chronicled an era of remarkable courage and social change. A new book celebrates that iconic body of work

Michele Landsberg, right, places grandson Zev in the amautik of Pond Inlet's Elisapie Ootova. The women were in Ottawa in 2002 to receive the Governor General's Award in Commemoration of the Persons Case, which honours the promotion of equity in Canada.

Tues., Oct. 18, 2011

The male editors of this newspaper may not have appreciated what was about to hit them and their readers when they hired 39-year-old Michele Landsberg as a columnist in 1978.

It's not that Landsberg has ever been a reserved sort. Born in Toronto to Russian Jewish immigrants, she “swam against the current in every possible way,” she writes of her youth in her fourth book, Writing the Revolution (Second Story Press). She was already seasoned when she hit the Star, with some years as a newspaper and magazine writer and young motherhood — plus marriage to the dashing NDP politican Stephen Lewis — behind her.

She brought legitimate lefty political cred to what began as a place in the “Women's section” and morphed over the years to front-section prominence. Long before she left the Star in 2003, Landsberg was renowned as one of the nation's clarion Second Wave feminists. She was the very model of the journalist-as-social activist, no mere recorder of the heady parade.

“I'd been born at the right moment in history and had stumbled into the perfect assignment at a time when the very themes dearest to my heart were making headline news,” she says in Writing the Revolution. “The rewards have been ample. I know that the feminist anecdotes, true-life accounts, analyses, and revelations in the columns had a direct and sometimes life-changing impact on many, many women — I know because they still seek me out to tell me so.”

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